Create Facebook Ads

Facebook breaks down the process of ad creation — across all our tools, and all our apps and services — into three distinct steps. At each part of the process, you can add specific information.

• Campaign

  
• Ad set

  
• Ad 

   

  Campaigns, ad sets, and ads are collectively referred to as ad objects.

  Select an ad object below to learn what information you'll provide at each step

  Campaigns contain ad sets and ads.

  Options you set at the campaign level reflect a concrete business goal.
  

  
  

  • The business goal you want the ad to drive is your ad objective. This might be Brand Awareness or Catalog Sales.
  • Every ad set or ad within a single campaign will share the same ad objective.

  Ads belong to ad sets, which in turn belong to campaigns.

  At the ad level, you'll choose the ad format and provide the creative and copy that people see on Facebook.
  
  This includes your ad's headline, content, photo or video assets, and destination URL

  Ad sets exist a level below campaigns, and contain ads.

  Options you set at the ad set level reflect your priorities around delivery, such as:
  

  
  

  • Target audience
  • Placements
  • Budget
  • Schedule

  
  

  Campaigns: Define your ad objective

  Facebook simplifies ad creation and delivery by selling ads based on ad objectives at the campaign level. Selecting an objective sets the business goal you want the ads within this campaign to accomplish. This helps Facebook determine the best ad placements, formats, and calls to action — and deliver your messages to the right people.
  

  
  

  To get started, access Ads Manager by visiting https://www.facebook.com/ads/manager, and look for the +Create button.

  

  
  To create an ad campaign, select your objective and give the campaign a meaningful name.

   

  
  

  Evaluate the 11 ad objectives available on Facebook

  Awareness: Drive attention and interest

   Facebook offers two awareness objectives:
  

  
  

  • Select Brand awareness to display your ad to people most likely to be interested in your product or service.
  • The Reach objective shows your ad to the maximum number of people.

  
  

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  Consideration: Engage and persuade

   
  

  Consideration is the middle stage of the consumer journey, when people are aware or your brand, but not yet ready to make a purchase.
  

  
  

  • The Traffic objective drives people to a website, app, or the Messenger.
  • Engagement ads are intended to increase post engagement, Page likes, or event responses.
  • If you’d like people to install your mobile or desktop app, try the App installs objective.
  • The Video views objective shows your content to people who are most likely to watch it.
  • Lead generation ads encourage people to share their contact details via a mobile-friendly form.
  • The Messages objectives encourages people to have conversations with your business in Messenger to complete purchases, answer questions, or offer support.

  
  

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  Conversion: Encourage meaningful results

   
  

  Conversion ad objectives drive action — such as a purchase or donation.
  

  
  

  • Ads using the Conversions objective ask people to do something in a website or app. Install the Facebook pixel to a website or SDK to an app to track actions people take, and to create audiences and optimize ad delivery based on those actions.
  • The Catalog sales objective is ideal for ecommerce, travel, auto, and real estate companies: You can link to images of every item you sell, and Facebook will display different items to different people, based on broad targeting criteria or how they've engaged with ads in the past.
  • The Store visits objective encourages people to visit your brick-and-mortar locations.

   
  

  Ad Sets: Define your strategy

  At the ad set level, advertisers set delivery preferences by defining the audience, choosing placements, and establishing a schedule and budget.
  Specify an audience
  Facebook allows advertisers to target different audience types.

  • • New audiences you create manually within an ad set are called Core Audiences. Their targeting options include location, gender, age, language, interests, and behaviors. Use them to target ads using Facebook data.
    • Custom Audiences let you securely input your customer data — or leverage Facebook engagement data — to reach people you already have a relationship with, such as people who've visited your website, provided their contact details, or liked your Facebook Page.
    • Lookalike Audiences find people with similar characteristics to people who've engaged with your ads or Page by combining Custom Audiences or Saved Audiences with Facebook data.

  Select placements 

  
  Your ads can appear on multiple platforms across the Facebook family of apps and services.
  
  The placements available to you may vary depending on which ad objective you selected, but will include at least one of the following:

  • • Facebook ads can appear in News Feeds, Instant Articles, In-stream Video, Suggested Videos, Marketplace, and in the Right Column on desktop.
  • • Instagram ads can appear in Feeds and Stories. (Note that if you select “Instagram Stories” as a placement, that ad won’t run anywhere else.)
  • • Audience Network extends your ads to other app and website publishers, in a range of placement types including native, banner, interstitial, in-stream video, and rewarded video.
  • • Messenger ads can drive re-engagement and scaled communication. They may appear in the Messenger home screen or may be sponsored messages.

  
  

  Choose a budget and schedule

  
  Set a daily or lifetime ad budget, and set start/end dates for the ad set. Ads Manager will tell you how many people are likely to see your ad (estimated reach) based on the budget you select.
  

  
  

  Note that optimization options and when you get charged may vary based on the campaign objective and placements you've selected.
  

  
  

  Explore Blueprint courses on setting budgets and understanding Facebook’s ad auction:
  
  

  • Ad Auction and Delivery Overview
  • How was I charged for my Facebook Ads?

  
  

  Ads: Get creative

  At the ad level, select the ad format and connect the ad to a Facebook Page or Instagram account that you manage. Give the ad an intuitive name to easily find and evaluate it within Ads Manager and in reporting.
  

  Formats

  
  

  Your ad objective and placement can impact which formats are available. Generally, they are:
  

  
  

  • Carousel: a scrollable sequence of 2-10 images or videos
  • Image: a single photo or graphic
  • Video: an ad anchored by a single video
  • Slideshow: a looping video ad composed of up to 10 images and/or frames extracted from a video to which you can add transitions and music
  • Collection: a visual and immersive way to promote your business or products

  
  

  Check out the Facebook Ads Guide for details about ad format and placement availability by ad objective.
  

  
  

  Marketers can add an Instant Experience to some ads, based on the objective selected. This fullscreen post-click experience, optimized for mobile, encourages playful exploration and interactions within the ad itself.

  
  

  Create a campaign

  

  To create a new campaign, select your ad objective and give the campaign a meaningful name.
  

  
  

  That's it! Your campaign has been created. But there's not much to it yet.

   Create an optional Split Test

  

  This option, which you set at the campaign level, enables you to test ad sets against each other to understand which strategies give you the best result. Learn more about Split Tests in the Help Center.

  
  

  Specify delivery at the ad set level

  At the ad set level, give the ad set a meaningful name, and choose a Page to run ads on behalf of.

  

  
  

  This is also where you specify your audience, select ad placements, and define a budget and delivery schedule.
  
  

  Audience

  Focus your ad's delivery by specifying an audience.
  

  
  

  You can include or exclude people from your audience based on demographics, location, interests, and behaviors. For example: display ads to everyone who lives within 20 miles of a major city, but exclude people who live in the city itself.
  

  
  

  There are three type of audiences: Core, Custom, and Lookalike.

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    Placements

    When you enable Automatic Placements, you’re telling Facebook to select the most relevant audiences at the best price, making the most efficient use of your ad budget.
    
    Select Edit Placements to manually choose where your ads will run. If you do so, consider testing various placements across ad sets to learn which ones are most effective.
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    Budget and Schedule

    Set a daily or lifetime ad budget, and start or end dates for the ads in the ad set.
    

    
    

    The Audience Size indicator tells you how many estimated ad impressions your budget will pay for.
    

    
    

    Estimated Daily Results is the number of people we estimate you'll reach in your audience, out of the total number of people in your audience who are active on the selected platforms each day. This has to do with factors like your bid and budget.
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  Choose your ad's format and creative

  Ad format

  At the ad level, you’ll name the ad, connect it to a Page or Instagram account you manage, and select an ad format.
  
  Available formats vary based on your ad’s objective.
  

  Ad creative

  Next, set the text, upload visual assets, and provide a headline, image captions, and destination URL.

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    Call to action

    Include a call to action button. The available actions will vary based on your ad objective.
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    Advanced options

    If your ad features third-party branded content, click into the Advanced Options to tag the Facebook Page that owns the rights to that content.
    
    This is also where experienced advertisers can connect online and offline conversion events with the ad.
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    Preview

    Finally, preview your ad to determine how it will look across devices and platforms.
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   Saving to draft

  When you're in the ad creation workflow and you click the Close button at the bottom left, you'll be prompted to either Close and Save to Draft or Close Without Saving.

   

  Close and Save to Draft enables you to save your progress and return later to complete your work. If you click Close Without Saving, your progress will be lost.

  

  
  

  Returning to edit

  After saving to draft, there are two ways to get back to the content you were working on to make changes or to finish.

  • 1. Navigate to the Campaigns, Ad Sets, or Ads tab, and click the Edit button (pencil icon) that appears when you hover over the element of your campaign you were working on.

     
  • 2. Select the +Create button from the level you were working at (campaign, ad sets, or ad), opt to Use Existing, then select the name of the item you want to return

     
  • The Save button only saves your work to draft. You'll be prompted to confirm changes before you leave the page. You can confirm changes at any time from anywhere in Ads Manager by clicking the Review and Publish button in the top-right, near Settings.

    

  Build Campaigns with Quick Creation

  Using the Quick Creation workflow enables large advertisers or agencies to rapidly frame campaigns while awaiting final creative and copy. It's a good option for experienced advertisers who may want the flexibility to complete campaign steps out of order. To toggle from the default guided campaign set up to Quick Creation, click the Switch to Quick Creation button in the upper right of the campaign creation workflow in Ads Manager.

  The Quick Creation option is less hands-on than creating complete campaigns and allows you to simultaneously draft all three elements at once or create new ad objects within an existing campaign or ad set.

   

  After you click Switch to Quick Creation, the guided campaign creation flow will be replaced with the screen you see below. You can switch back to Guided Creation at any time.

  

  

  Ad account settings

  The Settings area contains the following sections:
  

  
  

  • Ad Accounts: Set up or edit the name of your ad account, choose your currency, enter a business name, address, and tax ID number, and specify whether you're purchasing ads on behalf of a business or an agency.
    • This is also where you can set an ad attribution window, which tells Facebook how long after someone sees or interacts with an ad we should attribute people's actions to it.
    • Ad account admins can add people to or remove people from an ad account, and manage roles/permissions from this section.
  • Pages: View a list of all the Pages for which you have permissions, and what role you have on each.
  • Payment Settings: Add or edit payment methods, set a top-level spending limit on the ad account, and find out when your next billing date is.
  • Notifications: Manage how Facebook informs you of activity on your ad account(s). Set a primary email address.

  

  Billing and Payments
  
  Ad account admins can access billing details and payment methods through an ad account's Settings.
  

  
  

  Your spending limit, budget, and ad spend are all different figures.
  

  
  

  • The account spending limit is set at the ad account level, and is the maximum you're willing to pay for all ads for all time across your ad account. If you try to change this more than ten times in an hour, you'll have to wait a full hour before attempting again.
    • You can also set a spending limit at the campaign level. All ads within that campaign will stop running once the campaign limit is reached.
  • A budget, submitted at the ad set level, is the maximum amount you're willing to pay for delivery of the specific ads contained in that ad set per day.
  • Your ad spend is the actual amount you paid for those ads.
  • You can also specify a billing threshold, so you'll be automatically charged each time you hit a certain spend, and receive another bill at the end of the month for any outstanding balance.

   Payment Methods

  
  In the Payment Settings section of Settings, admins can set a spending limit for the entire ad account as well as select how to purchase Facebook ads:
  

  • By credit or debit card
  • Through PayPal
  • Directly from an online banking account
  • With a Facebook Ad Coupon (if you're eligible)

  
  This is also where you can view your current balance, and opt to pay it before it's due.

  

  Currencies
  
  

  Ad accounts operate within a single currency. If you operate internationally, you'll set up a new ad account for each currency you use to purchase Facebook ads. You can change your preferred currency by creating a new ad account operating with a different currency or by changing the currency in Ad Account Setup, under Ad Accounts in Settings.

  

  If you plan to operate multiple ad accounts, we recommend using Business Manager to link those accounts. This will help coordinate your efforts, teams, data reporting, and creative assets.